A good portion of INI entries are parsed by python directly. We would need to check if any of the rules are bent there. One rule i think that's bent is finding multiple entries under one heading that are the same spelling. Another is getting all the entries under one heading as a list. I dont think we restrict the entry name at all. I would need to check if pythons configparser has default restrictions.
Chris Sent from my Galaxy -------- Original message -------- From: Bertho Stultiens <[email protected]> Date: 2026-03-28 4:45 p.m. (GMT-08:00) To: EMC developers <[email protected]> Subject: [Emc-developers] INI file variable names and sections Hi all, The ini-file parser currently accepts spaces in variable names like: [section] one var = value two_var= some thing It is somehow, somewhat documented in docs/src/config/ini-config.adoc. However, it is unclear and undocumented what the first variable really is called and can be one of: - 'one var' - ' one var' - 'one var ' - ' one var ' (note the leading and trailing space). Using spaces in variable names is IMO very problematic and we all know how to use underscores (_) I believe. Variables should only contain letters, digits and underscore and not be allowed to start with a digit, just like normal identifiers (regex: [a-zA-Z_][a-zA-Z0-9_]*). As I'm writing a new ini-file parser (mostly done) I'd like to get rid of the spaces in variable names. Note that values, that is, all text after the '=', still may contain spaces and is left and right trimmed (stripped of whitespace). I.e. variable 'two_var' has value 'some thing' in above example. This variable name change could be added to the ini-file updater and fixed if there are any of these spaced variable names. There is work underway to update INI files to version 1.2 anyway. A second change I'd like to make is in the way variables are assigned to sections. Currently, it is allowed to start an ini-file with a variable that has no section header, like in: var=no_section_var [section] var=[section]var value You can get to the first 'var' only if you do not specify the section in the query. However, it is a very bad habit to allow variables to be outside sections because it only works at the top of the file and what do they describe? What is the problem of creating a section to encapsulate them and thereby making variables mandatory subordinates of a section header? It would be much more logical and consistent to do so. Additionally, I'd like to impose the same name restriction to sections making them standard identifiers, just like variables above. Using the same section name twice will result in a warning and the contents are merged. BTW, the new ini-file parser can be queried to return values as string, real, signed/unsigned integer (64 bit) and boolean. The parser does all necessary testing, conversion and error reporting. It supports different radix conversion for integral numbers with a prefix (hex: 0x, octal: 0o and binary: 0b) including optional leading +/- sign in any base. You can also use maps to map strings to values (or other strings) case sensitive or without case. This is also used internally to map boolean values. The new parser also handles nested #INCLUDE statements and no longer needs any includes to be handled and converted before running the actual LCNC binaries. -- Greetings Bertho (disclaimers are disclaimed) _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
